My love is as a fever longing still,
For that which longer nurseth the disease;
Feeding on that which doth preserve the ill,
The uncertain sickly appetite to please.
My reason, the physician to my love,
Angry that his prescriptions are not kept,
Hath left me, and I desperate now approve
Desire is death, which physic did except.
Past cure I am, now Reason is past care,
And frantic-mad with evermore unrest;
My thoughts and my discourse as madmen’s are,
At random from the truth vainly expressed;
     For I have sworn thee fair, and thought thee bright,
     Who art as black as hell, as dark as night.
 
Analysis
Sonnet 147 compares being in an abusive love affair to an illness you make no attempt to cure.

Willy longs sickly for his lady, who causes him the distress he suffers. He consumes her like tainted food which his malady makes him crave, prolonging his illness in a vicious cycle. His common sense, or reason, shakes its head at his self harm, and has left him for dead. He is a hopeless case. His thoughts and speech are mad, lies foolishly uttered – he can still only say kind words for his lady, whom he knows is terrible.
 
Will’s Wordplay
While the metaphor gives a poetic description of love gone wrong, we could look for a mundane explanation, and see this as someone who is suffering from a bad case of the pox. The closing line, with its suggestions of hell and darkness, is, as always, suggestive of the female hell, the vagina, which burns with the flame of venereal disease.The cure for the illness was obviously abstention from sex, which the poet does not seem to be able to manage, to his physician’s chagrin.

The Octagon, Roosevelt Island
The Octagon has a checkered past and a green future: built in 1834, it is an historic octagonal building located at 888 Main Street on Roosevelt Island in New York City. It originally served as the main entrance to the New York City Lunatic Asylum which opened in 1841. Designed by Alexander Jackson Davis, the five-story rotunda was made of blue-gray stone that was quarried on the island. It is the last remnant of the hospital and after many years of decay and two fires was close to ruin.
 
Sustainability
The Octagon, New York, NY, utilizes both solar panels and fuel cell installations. A 50kW array of solar panels and a 400 kW UTC Power PureCell system enable the building to generate more than 50% of its power. [1] The fuel cell, created by UTC Power, is a combined heat and power system that converts natural gas to electricity and heat via a combustion-free, electrochemical process. The fuel cell provides power and heat that meets the majority of the building’s energy demand, and the efficiency it achieves is much higher than the energy received from the power grid. Not only does the fuel cell provide more efficient energy usage, the heat from the process is also used for the building’s space heating and domestic water requirements.

The Octagon received the largest initial award of New York State Green Building Tax Credits and was recognized in the first New York City Green Buildings Competition with the “Green Apple Award” for leadership in applying sustainable design principles to residential development. In 2006, a newly constructed residential building was built on the site, modeled on the original structure. It received LEED Silver status from the U.S. Green Building Council in 2008.[4]
 
References
1. Fuel Cells: A Clean Energy Alternative at New World Trade Center, New York City’s Octagon
2. Fuel Cells and Solar Systems: A Powerful Partnership

ACTOR – Gretchen Egolf
Iʼm Gretchen Egolf. I live and work in New York, Los Angeles, and various regional theaters around America. Growing up in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, I started acting as a child and later went on to New York to train at the Juilliard School. There, some legendary teachers taught me some very strict rules about Shakespeare, with which I have subsequently monkeyed around excessively in my professional life. I have appeared on and off Broadway, in Londonʼs West End, and in lots of television and film over the years. Though Iʼve often felt like a double agent skirting between theater and film and television (maybe a triple agent?), itʼs always theater that I return home to. Shakespeare is an important joy of mine and Iʼm so happy to have him back in my life in recent years… having recently played Rosalind in As You Like It and currently Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing. The Sonnet Project is a happy addition to this concurrence, and also marks my film directorial debut.

More about me: www.gretchenegolf.com

I was very happy to collaborate again with Adam Chodzko on this piece, having worked with him on his recent film, Knots, shown at Tate Britain. More about him: www.adamchodzko.com

DIRECTOR – Gretchen Egolf
Iʼm Gretchen Egolf. I live and work in New York, Los Angeles, and various regional theaters around America. Growing up in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, I started acting as a child and later went on to New York to train at the Juilliard School. There, some legendary teachers taught me some very strict rules about Shakespeare, with which I have subsequently monkeyed around excessively in my professional life. I have appeared on and off Broadway, in Londonʼs West End, and in lots of television and film over the years. Though Iʼve often felt like a double agent skirting between theater and film and television (maybe a triple agent?), itʼs always theater that I return home to. Shakespeare is an important joy of mine and Iʼm so happy to have him back in my life in recent years… having recently played Rosalind in As You Like It and currently Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing. The Sonnet Project is a happy addition to this concurrence, and also marks my film directorial debut.

More about me: www.gretchenegolf.com

I was very happy to collaborate again with Adam Chodzko on this piece, having worked with him on his recent film, Knots, shown at Tate Britain.
 
EDITOR- Adam Chodzko
Adam Chodzko is a visual artist based in the UK but exhibiting internationally. His art explores the space between what we are and how we could be; investigating the interactions and possibilities of human behaviour. Working across media, from video installation to subtle interventions, and with a practice that is situated both within the gallery and the wider public realm, his work explores and invents a collective imagination through a poetics of everyday life. Chodzko has worked with Egolf as a performer on a number of recent projects including his video installation Knots, for the Tate, London. They are currently working together on an audio work set in the future, in a city submerged under floodwater, for UK radio.

Since 1991 Chodzko has exhibited extensively in international solo and group exhibitions including Tate Britain, Tate, St Ives; MAMbo; Athens Biennale; Istanbul Biennale; Venice Biennale etc. Recent projects include commissions by Creative Time, New York; The Contemporary Art Society, Frieze Art Fair, and Hayward Gallery, London. His work is in numerous public and private collections including Tate; Arts Council England; Saatchi Collection; etc.

Here is a website (that badly needs updating!): www.adamchodzko.com